The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’

This month, Tesla customers erupted in outrage over what some called a “bait and switch” by the electric vehicle manufacturer.

Initially, the company had offered to transfer the Full Self-Driving feature, which is now only available through a subscription model but could once be purchased for a “lifetime” fee that ran as high as $15,000, to any new Tesla purchased by March 31.

The deal was most tempting for drivers already enticed by a new base Cybertruck model that cost just $59,990, a price that CEO Elon Musk soon clarified would only last for 10 days, leaving potential buyers a very small window to make up their minds. (When first launched in November 2023, the cheapest Cybertrucks were $60,990, but by the beginning of 2026, the cost of the entry-level model went up to $79,990.)

Then Tesla quietly amended the language of the FSD transfer agreement, stipulating that customers would need to take delivery of a Tesla by March 31 in order to swap their FSD from their last vehicle to the next. With Tesla’s current production backlogs, that meant many people were committed to buying cars that would arrive too late to make the swap. The company gave buyers the option to cancel delivery and receive a refund of the $250 order fee.

On X—which Musk owns and frequently uses, making it a favored social media platform for Tesla enthusiasts—the community was livid. “Tesla still hasn’t fixed their blatant FSD Transfer lies for the $59k Cybertruck,” fumed the author of an account called The Cybertruck Guy, which is focused on the polarizing steel-paneled EV. “What a pathetic disaster.”

Such comments are not taken lightly in the Tesla bubble, where insufficient fealty to the brand or Musk can be taken as an attempt to sabotage either. Another Tesla influencer screenshotted Cybertruck Guy’s post to say: “Disappointing to see what I thought as respectable tesla accounts calling Tesla ‘liars’. Time to block these morons.” Of this exchange, another major Tesla booster chimed in to add: “Crazy to block people over this, but I don't need to be involved with people that want to worship a corporation and say they can do no wrong.”

Long before Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, it was an ideal gathering space for investors and customers of his car company.

There, they could follow him for updates about what was coming down the pipeline while expressing admiration for his supposed genius, continuously hyping each other up about the environmental benefits of EVs and the future of autonomous vehicles. Those who own shares of Tesla are rarely shy about their financial incentive to engage in this echo chamber—over the past six years, Tesla stock has increased approximately tenfold in value, giving the company a market capitalization of well over a trillion dollars.

Yet as the recent FSD transfer uproar demonstrates, people have their breaking points, and you can never know which unfulfilled promise (or ill-advised actions from Musk) will cause a Tesla fanatic to rethink their entire worldview. Then comes a difficult decision: Are they going to take their objections public and face exile from a hardened group that no longer tolerates such dissent? For those who decide to leave the fold, going on to challenge the aggrandizing narratives about Tesla and Musk can come to feel like a relief—and a duty.

For Earl Banning, a psychologist in Anchorage, Alaska, the process of breaking ranks from the Tesla gang was a gradual one.

Banning joined Twitter in 2018 after buying his first Tesla, in order to keep up with everything Musk shared about the direction of the company. Early on, he tells WIRED, he had the idea of demonstrating the Summon feature to his followers. “I could hit the button on my car and it would open the garage door, park itself, and shut the garage door, which was pretty neat,” Banning says. “I had recorded a high-speed video of that.” Musk himself retweeted the clip, as did the official Tesla account. “And then I got a whole bunch of followers.” Banning says. “It's like going to Vegas and winning the first time.”

At first, Banning enjoyed the camaraderie and optimism of the Tesla scene. He came up with the idea of “Frunk Puppy Friday,” where he and others shared pictures of their dogs in the front trunk compartment of their Teslas. Banning also attended in-person events and made friends around the country. As “more of an introvert,” he says “it was great to have this social community that I could interact with.” Meanwhile, it seemed the sky was the limit for Musk—and Banning was willing to go to bat for him online.

Banning dismissed Musk’s critics as “Elon haters” and says he spent “too much time” trashing them and other car companies, sometimes via memes. “I was totally that guy.”

He recalls going after auto industry journalists and “really anybody else who was remotely negative about Tesla—I was insufferable and just all over those folks.” Banning thought these skeptics were “suffering from misinformation” and “couldn't see the good that Elon was doing.” He also knew there were outspoken Tesla short-sellers who wanted to see the company tank, and when he engaged with anti-Tesla opponents on X, he regularly accused them of holding these market positions.

Even as Banning fell into the habit of defending Musk and Tesla from detractors, a few of Musk’s questionable tweets didn’t sit well with him. As the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Banning found himself aghast at the billionaire’s public commentary on the virus, which was completely at odds with his knowledge of epidemiology as a health care professional. In March of that year, Musk tweeted that the “coronavirus panic is dumb” and predicted “close to zero new cases” of Covid-19 in the US by the end of April. “I started to at least realize that he was kind of a moron about many topics,” Banning says, observing that even when Musk would be called out for getting things wrong, “he would never correct it and never learn anything.”

Neither Musk nor Tesla returned a request for comment on the ways in which formerly ardent Tesla backers have grown disillusioned with him and the company.

Along with other prominent influencers, Banning got early beta access to FSD in late 2020. By that point, Musk had been selling a vision of fully autonomous vehicles for years, and Banning assumed Tesla had worked most of the bugs out of its system before releasing it. The first time he tried it, he says, his car lurched straight for a fire hydrant. Banning kept experimenting with FSD despite such nerve-wracking scares. “One day, I was coming out of Walmart, and it abruptly turned itself onto the sidewalk, and was trying to drive down the sidewalk,” he says. Eventually he concluded that “either Elon is lying or he's brain-damaged or something, because there's no way you could sit in that car in 2020 and think that it's going to be finished soon.” (Years later, Tesla continues to face lawsuits over its driver-assistance features; recently, a Houston driver filed a suit alleging that her Cybertruck attempted to drive itself off an overpass.)

As Banning began to express his reservations about Tesla’s claims and Musk’s character, he lost scores of followers and fell out with friends on social media. The final straw came in December 2022, when Banning had the chance to address the CEO directly in a Twitter live chat. Banning says he told Musk of his concern that his incendiary political comments, which were becoming more frequent, could hurt Tesla. “I said my child is transgender, who had always been a big fan of Tesla, but at this point they're not because of the things you're saying about that community,” Banning says. Musk waved off the remark, saying he wouldn’t suppress his views to boost Tesla’s stock price.

From then on, Banning was a sworn enemy of the Teslarati, even though he still loves his Model X and rarely speaks badly of Tesla itself. He made amends to some of the critics he used to attack and continues